National Lawyers Guild - NLG studentshttp://www.nlg.org/taxonomy/term/401
enNLG Student Chapters to Hold Country-Wide “Black Lives Matter” Day of Actionhttp://www.nlg.org/news/releases/nlg-student-chapters-hold-country-wide-black-lives-matter-day-action
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<img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www.nlg.org/sites/default/files/styles/full_node/public/brooklyn%20law%20school%20die%20in.jpg?itok=M4D4SxyM" width="400" height="267" alt="" /> </div>
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<span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2015-03-30T12:30:00-04:00">March 30, 2015</span> </div>
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Tasha Moro </div>
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Communications Coordinator </div>
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<a href="mailto:communications@nlg.org">communications@nlg.org</a> </div>
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212-679-5100, ext. 15 </div>
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<p>NEW YORK—On Thursday, April 2, two days before the 47<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., National Lawyers Guild (NLG) students and faculty will hold a <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/905848712812104/">day of action</a> at law schools nationwide in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement against racist police violence and white supremacy. Despite strong, grassroots organizing and regular demonstrations since the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, police killings of unarmed Black Americans continue with impunity. This week, NLG members will coordinate with other student and local groups to disrupt business as usual and call attention to the racist legal system which criminalizes and oppresses people of color.</p>
<p>As the nation’s first racially integrated bar association, the NLG has a <a href="//www.nlg.org/our-history">long history</a> of standing with social movements that challenge systemic criminalization and marginalization of people of color. The Guild’s commitment to racial justice continues today, and student members recognize their responsibility to working toward a more just legal system: “As law students, we support the work of activists who directly fight oppression and the racism of our society. We also appreciate our privilege and our responsibility to fight the same racism and oppression within our legal system, especially through supporting the work of radical activists by fighting their criminalization,” explained Tasha Marshall, President of the NLG chapter at Western New England School of Law.</p>
<p>Since the movement emerged from Ferguson last August, NLG students have been offering support and solidarity through legal observing at protests, holding “know your rights” trainings on police encounters, organizing demonstrations, and hosting events to discuss the links between racism, law enforcement, and the broader criminal justice system. In a <a href="//www.nlg.org/news/announcements/following-ferguson-doj-report-nlgs-anti-racism-committee-and-tupocc-demand">recent statement</a> on the Department of Justice’s <a href="http://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/04/ferguson_police_department_report.pdf">scathing report</a> on the Ferguson Police Department, Co-chair of The United People of Color Caucus (TUPOCC) of the NLG Oren Nimni states, “The NLG stands in full support of those actively resisting these policies and practices. We are encouraged by the work of Black Lives Matter activists in Ferguson and nationwide which has brought much needed public attention to the racially discriminatory policing practices that caused the deaths of Oscar Grant, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tony Robinson, and countless others. While we can and should continue to push for legal reform, it is also abundantly clear that the legal system sanctions and incentivizes the repression of Black communities, and that resistance is required.”</p>
<p>This Thursday, law students and faculty will bring the movement to law schools by a series of actions designed to publicly tie law enforcement’s continual disregard for Black lives to a racist and oppressive legal system. NLG Chapters from San Francisco to Boston will be organizing vigils, moments of silence during classes, trainings and events to bring awareness to the legal community, and visible reminders such as posters and banners at their law schools.</p>
<p>Claire White, NLG National Student Vice President and member of the UC Davis Law Guild chapter explained: “As students, we spend much of our time in the classroom studying history and theory, while all around us the Black community is being directly targeted and oppressed at all levels by the justice system we're preparing to serve. It's time for law students of conscience to stand up and speak out.”</p>
<p><em>To learn more abut the day of action, visit the Facebook event page <a href="http://www.facebook.com/events/905848712812104/">here</a>.</em></p>
<p><em>The National Lawyers Guild was formed in 1937 </em><em>as an association of progressive lawyers and jurists who believed in the reconstruction of legal values to emphasize human rights over property interests. The Guild is the oldest and most extensive network of public interest and human rights activists working in the legal field.</em></p>
<p><em># # #</em></p>
<p>Photo: NLG students at Brooklyn Law School hold a Black Lives Matter "die-in," December 2014. (Via <a href="http://facebook.com/nlgstudents">Facebook.com/NLGstudents</a>)</p>
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<a href="/taxonomy/term/478" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">#BlackLivesMatter</a> </div>
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<a href="/taxonomy/term/401" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">NLG students</a> </div>
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<a href="/taxonomy/term/380" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Law Students</a> </div>
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<a href="/taxonomy/term/109" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">police accountability</a> </div>
Mon, 30 Mar 2015 16:36:10 +0000Tasha1661 at http://www.nlg.orghttp://www.nlg.org/news/releases/nlg-student-chapters-hold-country-wide-black-lives-matter-day-action#commentsNYC College Students Ponder Post-Garner Activismhttp://www.nlg.org/news/in-the-media/nyc-college-students-ponder-post-garner-activism
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Elizabeth Walters </div>
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Village Voice </div>
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<span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2015-01-14T00:00:00-05:00">Wed, 01/14/2015</span> </div>
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<a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2015-01-14/news/nyc-college-activism/">View the original piece</a> </div>
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<img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www.nlg.org/sites/default/files/styles/full_node/public/images/nyc-college-activism.10238865.87.jpg?itok=jpeMSodz" width="400" height="266" alt="NYU Students Die In" title="NYU Students Die In" /> </div>
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<p><strong>Dozens of students with their mouths taped shut </strong>holding vigil on the stairs of the NYU student center. Hundreds of students lying prone in a "die-in" at the Columbia University holiday tree lighting. Thousands of people marching down streets, blocking highways, and crossing bridges to protest the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Akai Gurley and the lack of indictments for the officers responsible. Tens of thousands flowing down Broadway behind an eight-panel artwork depicting Garner's eyes.</p>
<p>For most New York City students, the events of last semester represented the biggest protest movement of their college lives. The scope of the activism went far beyond campus: Many of the faces at citywide marches were college-age, and in the largest event, the Millions March on December 13, many participants wore fraternity jackets or college hoodies and carried signs for their schools.</p>
<p>But outrage is not an unlimited resource, and as the weeks pass, the number of protesters will likely decline. With the start of a new semester, student groups face the challenge of continuing the momentum of last fall as the emotional pitch on campus cools.</p>
<p>"If we could continue the conversation and not allow that conversation to die out," that would be key, says Rahani Green, a sophomore and the public relations chair of the undergraduate Black Student Union at New York University. "I think that with a lot of movements there's this hot spot and then it dies down. And we want to keep it going."</p>
<p>During Welcome Week in August, the BSU held a moment of silence for Brown where 100 students sat with tape over their mouths for fifteen minutes on the steps of the Kimmel Center for University Life. Near the end of the semester, the group sponsored a die-in inside Bobst Library that included about 300 students and 60 faculty and staff.</p>
<p>Going forward, Green says, the group is considering holding sessions on police brutality at its annual Black History Month conference next month. It also will be pursuing two demands it has submitted to the administration: a meeting with school president John Sexton and the development of a mandatory course, likely to be held during orientation week, that teaches new students about such issues as white privilege and microaggression.</p>
<p>Green says this is just part of the group's dedication to pursuing a more political profile. "People have come up to me and said that they really appreciate that we're being more active," she says.</p>
<p>Helping to organize some of the protests in the city was the Revolutionary Student Coordinating Committee, a group founded in 2012 as part of the movement to restore free tuition across CUNY campuses. Percy Lujan, a senior at Lehman College and the group's media officer, says the group envisions CUNY as an entity that belongs to the community and should be controlled by and serve as a resource for it.</p>
<p>The police shootings inherently touch the lives of CUNY students, says Lujan. "They see police brutality happening on a daily basis," he says. "The role of groups like RSCC is to organize the students around those issues and help the students figure out the ways their university can become a place for liberation."</p>
<p>RSCC was not an organizer of the Millions March, which drew about 25,000 participants to midtown Manhattan, but the group led a contingent of between 100 and 200 people, says Tafadar Sourov, a junior at City College and the group's education officer and secretary. Because RSCC emphasizes engaging with local residents, he said, its own protests generally happen in more residential neighborhoods: "We take it to Harlem, we take it to Queens, to where Akai Gurley was killed in Brooklyn, to use the marches to reach the community."</p>
<p>As the spring semester begins, leaders say, the RSCC will work to keep up momentum by refocusing on issues it had prioritized before the protests took off, and emphasizing their connection to police brutality. These include advocating for undocumented immigrants and refugees, including Rasmea Odeh, a Palestinian convicted of immigration fraud in November; supporting Palestinians; and protesting the presence of the military on CUNY campuses, particularly former Army general and CIA director David Petraeus, who has been teaching at Macaulay Honors College. The RSCC also plans to help students in New Jersey, Philadelphia, and elsewhere who have expressed interest in forming chapters at their own schools.</p>
<p>Amy Helfant, a second-year student at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, was one of approximately 60 marchers carrying blue Cardozo placards in the Millions March. A board member of the school's National Lawyers Guild chapter and a fellow of its Public Service Scholars program, Helfant says the Brown and Garner cases raise issues of particular concern for law students, including matters of equal protection and the legitimacy of the law.</p>
<p>"If prosecutors aren't even trying to prosecute, then what's happening with the legal field in general?" she says. "If someone has a job to do and they're not even doing that job correctly or they don't believe in its importance, that delegitimizes the whole system."</p>
<p>Before the Millions March, the law school itself sent an email inviting all students to march together, and the school provided the placards. "I was honestly quite shocked but very happy that they did that," says Helfant.</p>
<p>The NLG's Cardozo chapter offered a "Know Your Rights" training in the wake of Ferguson that drew several dozen students eager to learn to teach people how to interact with law enforcement. This semester, the NLG plans a campus training for Legal Observers, the lawyers whose neon-green hats make them easy to spot at the fringes of protests. In March, the Public Service Scholars program plans a conference on policing that will be open to law students, legal workers, lawyers, and the public.</p>
<p>Helfant, a veteran of several social-justice movements, including the pro-Palestinian movement, the anti-war movement, the environmental-justice movement, and the abortion rights movement, said she knows that participation will decline from last semester's groundswell.</p>
<p>"I see it as something that's going to be a big struggle," she said. "Though the scale of the protests are really big and there are so many new participants, I think that it's hard to just say, 'OK, well, there's been these events and now we will maintain this energy.'" But she believes that if the school itself reaches out as it did last semester, people will continue to take action. "I think that drew students who hadn't been involved in any sort of activism before," she says.</p>
<p>Ultimately, student leaders say, whether others will continue to participate in activism might come down to whether they feel personally affected by the situations they're protesting. Green says students need to realize that acts of racism will continue unless people continue to bring them to light. The RSCC leaders stress the need for their group to engage the community — for instance, by helping to set up self-regulating community patrols that can respond instead of police officers — and for students to see the university as a tool for change. Helfant says that in her experience, for people to stay involved in activism, they need to perceive activism as a part of their identities, not just as something they do.</p>
<p>All say, however, that they have reason to hope. "Young people definitely want to be involved in charting the course of history," Sourov says. "Something is definitely changing, and I think it's for the positive."</p>
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<a href="/taxonomy/term/401" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">NLG students</a> </div>
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<a href="/taxonomy/term/93" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">NLG-NYC</a> </div>
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<a href="/taxonomy/term/36" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">protest</a> </div>
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<a href="/taxonomy/term/478" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">#BlackLivesMatter</a> </div>
Tue, 27 Jan 2015 17:44:30 +0000Tasha1624 at http://www.nlg.orghttp://www.nlg.org/news/in-the-media/nyc-college-students-ponder-post-garner-activism#commentsBeyond Disorientation: Radicalizing Your Law School with the NLG http://www.nlg.org/beyond-disorientation-radicalizing-your-law-school-nlg
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<p><a href="//www.nlg.org/sites/default/files/Beyond%20disorientation.pdf">Download PDF</a></p>
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Tue, 08 Jul 2014 21:16:40 +0000Tasha1507 at http://www.nlg.orghttp://www.nlg.org/beyond-disorientation-radicalizing-your-law-school-nlg#commentsStudent Chapter Checklisthttp://www.nlg.org/student-chapter-checklist-0
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<a href="/taxonomy/term/380" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Law Students</a> </div>
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Tue, 08 Jul 2014 21:05:15 +0000Tasha1506 at http://www.nlg.orghttp://www.nlg.org/student-chapter-checklist-0#commentsNLG aids U.S. University students protesting for Palestinian rightshttp://www.nlg.org/news/in-the-media/nlg-aids-us-university-students-protesting-palestinian-rights
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Toshio Meronek </div>
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Al Jazeera </div>
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<span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2013-12-09T00:00:00-05:00">Mon, 12/09/2013</span> </div>
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<a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2013/12/palestinian-activism-grows-at-us-universities-20131268268601383.html">View the original piece</a> </div>
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<p> </p>
<p class="Normal">By the third evening of the American Studies Association’s national conference, a petition calling for the boycott of Israeli academic institutions had garnered some 850 signatures. An opposing petition had just over 50.</p>
<p class="Normal">Still, there was quite a bit of controversy when on December 4, the National Council of the American Studies Association (ASA) endorsed a boycott condemning the Israeli government's treatment of Palestinians. In American academia, criticising Israel has often come with a heavy backlash, including lawsuits and claims of anti-Semitism. Yet American professors and students are increasingly critical of what many have called Israeli apartheid, comparing the current segregation of Palestinians to that faced by black South Africans prior to 1995.</p>
<p class="Normal">Recognising the divisiveness of the issue, the Association held a town hall attended by several hundred members on November 22 . During the open question-and-answer section, Lena Ibrahim, a first-generation Palestinian American student living in Virginia, took the microphone. Ibrahim had recently returned from a trip to visit family and friends in Palestine.</p>
<p class="Normal">"I went to Palestine and looked around, and I was so depressed, thinking peace will never come." But she was heartened by the scholarly discussion. "This is how peace will come," she told the audience. The ASA’s membership now has until December 15 to vote on whether the organisation will adopt the resolution.</p>
<p class="Normal">The boycott that the ASA’s council signed off on includes all Israeli academic institutions, and follows a similar move last April by the Association for Asian American Studies. Some ASA members took to the organisation’s website to criticise the move (one threatened to cancel his membership), and 50-some scholars, most of whom did not attend November’s conference, signed a counter-petition rejecting the boycott.</p>
<p class="Normal">Opponents were chiefly concerned with the question of why single out Israel rather than other countries with records of human rights abuses, such as the United States. Claire Potter, a history professor at New York’s New School who blogs under the name "Tenured Radical" wrote in the <span class="Normal__Char" style="font-style: italic; ">Chronicle of Higher Education</span> that "putting the question of why Israel’s human rights violations are being singled out as especially gruesome, given US complicity in the repression of many peoples across the globe, the ASA also runs the risk of isolating progressive colleagues in Israel by passing this resolution."</p>
<p class="Normal">Proponents responded by pointing out that the boycott targets institutions, not individual professors, and to the fact that the US government is the number one foreign funder of Israel’s military, bestowing more than $3b annually. More than 170 Palestinian groups have signed on to an appeal asking the international community to join the boycott.</p>
<p class="Normal"><span class="Normal__Char" style="font-weight: bold; ">Fighting back</span></p>
<p class="Normal">"As much as people are trying to prevent students from acting by scaring them or by arresting them, it doesn’t help them. The more that you stifle the voices of students on campus, the more they end up uniting and fighting back," said Hannan Seirafi, a fourth-year economics major at the University of California at Irvine (UCI), speaking over the phone from her home in Southern California. Seirafi joined the campus group Students for Justice in Palestine in 2010, a year after a now famous incident in which 11 Muslim students, in an attempt to call attention to the Israeli government’s actions, interrupted a speech by the Israeli ambassador to the US, Michael Oren.</p>
<p class="Normal">The fallout was substantial. The students, who came to be known on campus and in media reports as the "Irvine 11", were later sued on free speech charges, and University of California President Mark Yudof followed up by sending a series of university-wide announcements condemning UCI’s Muslim Student Union, which was soon suspended.</p>
<p class="Normal">The California State Assembly went so far as to pass a resolution, HR 35, which critics say wrongly equates criticism of Israel with anti-Jewish racism. "These are all attempts to scare students into thinking, if you are criticising Israeli policies on campus, you are being anti-Semitic, and therefore you are discriminating and you should not have the right to speak out.</p>
<p class="Normal">The thing we’ve come to realise is these things aren’t actually scaring students," says Seirafi, explaining that even the risk of a backlash did not prevent her from joining Students for Justice in Palestine. The group’s annual meeting in late October at Stanford University drew between 300 to 400 representatives from colleges around the country, according to conference organisers.</p>
<p class="Normal">Now, a sort of backlash to the backlash is gaining momentum. Over the past couple years there has been an upsurge in pro-Palestinian human rights activism on college campuses across the US. In November 2012, UCI’s student council unanimously-and defiantly-voted in favor of the college pulling its investments from Israeli companies. In a matter of months, student councils at UC Berkeley, Riverside, and San Diego had done the same, and a bill that would have thwarted student action at UCLA, by placing a blanket ban on divestment measures at the school, failed.</p>
<p class="Normal">Daniel Narvy, president of a pro-Israel campus group named after UCI’s mascot, Anteaters for Israel, believes most criticism about Israel on his campus "is rooted in misinformation, bigotry, and distortion of history…the history of wars is ignored, and the call for another Jewish holocaust has become acceptable for speakers on the anti-Israel perspective," he said, referring to Amir Abdul Malik Ali, a Muslim imam from Oakland, California, who has spoken several times at UCI, and has called for an Islamic, one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.</p>
<p class="Normal">"My personal opinion is the student body should focus on matters pertaining to the school itself-the school newspaper, sports teams, tuition hikes… However, our student body decided to pass a symbolic piece of legislation to single out Israel in legislation riddled with lies and distortions of history."</p>
<p class="Normal">And yet, the list of academic institutions across the US opting to stand with Palestinians is growing. The largest pension provider for US professors, TIAA-CREF, pulled out nearly $73m in investments from Caterpillar, which produces construction equipment such as weaponised bulldozers used to demolish Palestinian villages; Missouri’s Earlham College stopped stocking the Israel-based hummus brand Sabra in its cafeteria; and New York City’s Brooklyn College refused to cancel a panel dealing with boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel, despite threats by city officials saying they’d move to defund the college if the event went forward as planned.</p>
<p class="Normal">All of this is a response to a 2005 open call by Palestinian organisations for international boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel, inspired by a similar push in South Africa during apartheid. For their part, South Africa’s government has officially endorsed the Palestinian call; the chairperson of South Africa’s ruling party went so far as to call Israel "far worse than Apartheid South Africa." </p>
<p class="Normal"><span class="Normal__Char" style="font-weight: bold; ">Morally obliged</span></p>
<p class="Normal">Steven Salaita, an associate English professor at Virginia Tech whose Palestinian grandmother lost her home in Jerusalem when Israel was established in 1948, says it’s important for universities to take a stand on the issue "because of their obligation to improve the conditions of the world through education. It goes against their very identities to be complicit in acts such as military occupation and ethnic cleansing, [not to mention] their deep investment with military industries."</p>
<p class="Normal">Salaita, who sits on the organizing committee for the US Campaign for the Academic &amp; Cultural Boycott of Israel (UCACBI), argues that "there’s plenty in university mission statements that talks about creating a better and more dynamic, and more ethical, world, and it’s those obligations that they need to remain focused on rather than running themselves as corporations interested in making profit or accruing status."</p>
<p class="Normal">Fellow UCACBI organiser Sunaina Maira is a professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis, who left the US last year to spend time working as a teacher in a Palestinian refugee camp. "Although I had watched so many documentary films on Palestine, and heard talks from people who were reporting on their visits," nothing prepared Maira for "this feeling of being caged."</p>
<p class="Normal">Traveling by taxi-bus through some of the more than 500 Israeli army checkpoints, "not knowing whether it was going to take one hour, or if it was going to take two hours, or [much longer]," Maira befriended Palestinian students who told her of the hardships they underwent in their pursuit of an education.</p>
<p class="Normal">"Something as simple as getting books is very difficult in Palestine," and Palestinian students who manage to get into Israeli universities "experience all this intense surveillance and repression, and banning of their public events, cultural events, and lectures," she says, pointing to the work of the group Academic Watch, which documents the special obstacles that Palestinian students face.</p>
<p class="Normal">For example, its website details how at one Israeli college, Palestinians are banned from running for student council.</p>
<p class="Normal">Likewise, in the US, says Maira, "There is a network of powerful, partisan, pro-Israel organisations and lobby groups, and there’s a kind of line that’s enforced: to be supportive of Israel is identical to being supportive of the US. This situation also shapes the academic climate." She says that within academia, speaking critically about Israel comes with "a fear that one may not get tenure; that one may not get a fellowship if you’re a graduate student. If you’re an undergraduate it might affect your course grade-there is this really heavy apparatus of repression that people are dealing with on a day to day basis."</p>
<p class="Normal">Her fears are far from unfounded. Responses from university chancellors and regents have generally been hostile, as at the University of California. At Massachusetts’ small, private Hampshire College, in 2009 students collected 800 signatures from students, staff, alumni, and parents of students calling for divestment from Israeli companies.</p>
<p class="Normal">But administrators refused to single out Israel, leading student activists to release a statement: "Divestment from Apartheid South Africa did not prove politically popular in 1977 when Hampshire became the first college in the US to take a stand. It is to be expected that the first of any movement faces great pressure and criticism. [Students for Justice in Palestine] is disappointed that the college is choosing to shy away from the political implications of its action rather than embrace this moment."</p>
<p class="Normal">At Florida Atlantic University, student activists received probation and were forced to attend diversity classes produced by the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League after interrupting a lecture by an Israeli soldier. Maira notes that the very concept of an Israeli military campus tour is "extremely provocative, and in any other situation of occupation or war would be considered really inflammatory…while the war is going on."</p>
<p class="Normal">The Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the National Lawyers’ Guild came to the students’ side, sending a letter expressing concern regarding "the apparently biased manner in which these disciplinary proceedings were undertaken, and in the unwarranted severity of the agreements’ conditions. The University’s actions in this matter establish a chilling precedent for student campus speech on controversial issues, especially concerning Palestinian rights."</p>
<p class="Normal">Early efforts to get academia involved were largely student-led-the student council of Michigan’s Wayne State University was the first to adopt a resolution supporting divestment, as early as 2003-but faculty members have begun speaking up as well.</p>
<p class="Normal">In the American Association of University Professors’ (AAUP) <span class="Normal__Char" style="font-style: italic; ">Journal of Academic Freedom </span>published in October, editor Ashley Dawson wondered if it was time for the organisation and its 48,000 members to take a stand on the Israel-Palestine issue. "Several incidents that unfolded around the time that the [journal opened to submissions] suggested that the time was ripe for such a discussion," Dawson wrote.</p>
<p class="Normal">The association had recently expressed concern over academic repression in Latin America and Singapore. But the organisation hadn’t yet addressed a problem with similar circumstances in Israel: an Israeli governmental organisation recommended closing the political science department at one of Israel’s largest academic institutions, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, criticizing the department’s "lack of balance" and emphasis on "community activism". University staff had previously been accused of anti-Zionism by right-wing groups.</p>
<p class="Normal"><span class="Normal__Char" style="font-weight: bold; ">No longer taboo</span></p>
<p class="Normal"><a name="_GoBack" style="color: rgb(251, 157, 4); text-decoration: none; " id="_GoBack"></a>"This appeared to be a clear and grievous violation of academic freedom, and the AAUP’s sister organisation, the Canadian Association of University Teachers, responded with a letter to the Israeli Minister of Education," wrote Dawson, who also voiced his support in person for the ASA’s boycott at its conference’s open forum.</p>
<p class="Normal">"The AAUP’s silence on this matter suggests that the organisation urgently needs to develop policies on how to respond to such incidents." US. Professors famous outside the academic world, including Judith Butler, Angela Davis, Stephen Hawking, and Cornel West have already lent their names to the BDS cause.</p>
<p class="Normal">Many professors and students are linking Palestine to other colonial struggles. "I’m from India, and I’m deeply shaped by the question of colonialism and anti-imperial struggle," says Maira. "It just seemed like an obvious issue that one needed to take a progressive stand on."</p>
<p class="Normal">At her campus, UC Davis, she says, "The Chicano and Latino students have been amazing allies of the Palestinian students," connecting colonial struggles in Latin America to the situation of Palestinians. Wesleyan University professor J. Kehaulani Kauanui, who has written extensively on Native American and Hawaiian struggles against European colonialism, was part of a delegation of professors from five US universities who visited Palestine in 2012.</p>
<p class="Normal">"American Studies scholars well know the persistent legacy of apartheid, both legal and de facto in this country," she said. "US settler colonialism, occupation, and apartheid all point to why the US administration never condemns Israel, besides its geopolitical interests in the Middle East. To do so would call into question the entire US-American project."</p>
<p class="Normal">Days after the ASA conference, UC Riverside English professor David Lloyd wrote in the <span class="Normal__Char" style="font-style: italic; ">Electronic Intifada</span>blog that what happened at the ASA signaled an end to what he calls "the blockade on debate". A new climate was forming, he wrote, "in which critical discussion of Israel’s policies towards Palestine will no longer be taboo".</p>
<p class="Normal">Maira agrees. "What is remarkable about this campaign is you realise there are so many, many people who are actually in support of this, but they haven’t had an opportunity to come forth and demonstrate that support publicly." She recognises that the movement will have to grow far beyond the world of academia in order for the Palestinian story to have a happier ending, but says the boycott is symbolic of something bigger. "The point around the boycott and divestment is actually just to rupture-to interrupt-that lockdown on the Palestine issue. Fifty percent of the work, I feel, is really around opening up space to talk about these issues."</p>
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<h3 class="field-label">
Tags </h3>
<div class="field-tags">
<a href="/taxonomy/term/175" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Israel</a> </div>
<div class="field-tags">
<a href="/taxonomy/term/400" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">student activism</a> </div>
<div class="field-tags">
<a href="/taxonomy/term/401" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">NLG students</a> </div>
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<a href="/taxonomy/term/402" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Palestinian rights</a> </div>
<div class="field-tags">
<a href="/taxonomy/term/222" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Palestine</a> </div>
Mon, 09 Dec 2013 20:28:11 +0000Tasha1019 at http://www.nlg.orghttp://www.nlg.org/news/in-the-media/nlg-aids-us-university-students-protesting-palestinian-rights#comments